A Eulogy for the World That Affirmative Action Made

Over breakfast yesterday, I read that physicists had discovered a sonic hum perhaps caused by enormous objects like black holes converging and rippling the space-time continuum. I grew up in my grandparents’ railroad apartment in South Brooklyn, and now live a life that stuns me with its privilege and creative freedom—I’m someone who thinks a lot about space and time, and how one traverses them. The idea of the ripples intrigued me: For a moment, I fantasized about my alternative futures. If I were born today, what might I become?

In the early morning, any future seemed possible. By lunch, after the Supreme Court had struck down affirmative action in college admissions, that was no longer true. The time of infinite possibility for a Latina from a low-income background like me was over. At least in this space called America.

When you’re an “other” at a predominantly white, elite institution, you share the knowledge that this place was not created for someone like you, no matter how welcome you might be now. Your presence relies on someone before you being the first—the first African American student, the first Latino, the first Asian American. This knowledge creates cross-cultural affinities—alliances and bonds among races and ethnicities that might not exist in any other setting. An understanding is born: We are all here, though our grandparents could not be. How can we be here for one another?

Almost immediately, texts began coming in from my college friends. One, a Latina who’d grown up in a New York City housing project and was the first in her family to attend college, proclaimed numbness, insisting she’d long ago lost faith in institutions, only to later admit that she was just pretending to feel that way as a form of self-protection. Another first-generation classmate, an Asian American woman from the Midwest, was distraught. “The entirety of what made you and me feel connected is like a separate universe now,” she said.

I went to Brown in the mid-’90s, when the minority-student population was so small that we had little choice but to stick together. At that time, I didn’t realize that I would spend my life navigating white power structures; I thought the challenges of life at Brown were just a temporary discomfort. A discomfort that I weathered with the help of my friends: Black, Latino, Afro-Latino, East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Native American. Our shared resources—deans, campus space for cultural clubs, access to public computers—were limited, but our support for one another was bountiful. During Black History Month, or Latino Heritage Month, or the annual Legends of the SEA (Southeast Asian) dance performance, we could count on our collective minority community to turn out. Every Friday was Unity Day at the minority-student center, and we danced and snacked and gossiped together.

The blow of the ruling, of the way it will deny access by denying the existence of racism, was made more painful by how it happened. The cases relied on the cynical recruitment of a handful of aggrieved Asian American plaintiffs who felt, alongside white plaintiffs, that less-qualified Black and Latino students were taking their spots. After this decision, The New York Times reported, “campuses of elite institutions would become whiter and more Asian and less Black and Latino.” There it was, in black and white: We were all to be pitted against one another.

Young people of color aren’t just losing or gaining “spots”; they’re losing that multicultural community that once meant so much to me. Diversity will dwindle, but so too will the sense of shared grace that students of color extended to one another in these white spaces.

I did not deserve, on paper, to go to Brown. I had a perfect GPA in high school, but so did plenty of others who applied. I took what AP courses my public high school offered, which turned out, in the scheme of things, to be limited. I’d crushed my PSATs only to find myself crushed (twice) by the real thing. I was passionate about a handful of extracurriculars. Yet what I had and what they saw in me must have made me a good fit for their Open Curriculum: intense curiosity and the drive to act on it. I had not, like most of my classmates who’d gone through rigorous preparatory schools or well-funded suburban public ones, been “bred” to go to a school like Brown. But because of affirmative action, the admissions office looked past this imperfect pedigree, and saw me not for my limited experience in this elite arena, but for my possibility.

Like most things white society does for minorities, the concession came with a cost. It stung to have to endure—at the tender age of 17, when I was admitted (early, no less)—accusations from white students in my honors classes of having “used my ethnicity” to “take a spot.” In the beginning, it was hard to overcome this sense of needing to prove myself, to prove that I deserved my place there. But I chose to see it this way: Brown had taken a chance on me and I had taken a chance on Brown. For all parties, the gamble paid off.

I say I took a chance on Brown because there were easier paths. I could have gone full ride to any number of wonderful New York State or City schools, or even smaller private ones. I could have gone to a college where minority cultures were integral and not peripheral to campus life. Instead I went to Brown, a place that had taken 223 years to graduate a mere 100 Latinos. I took a chance and moved to Providence, and what I got in return was an expanded view of the world. An understanding of capital in all its forms. Entrée into spaces—whether or not people like to admit it—that only institutions like Ivies provide.

Above all, I gained from college a new sense of community and its importance. Yes, some of us were raised to go to places like Brown and others were not, but what we shared were curiosity, ambition—a desire to understand, and possibly better, the world. These are qualities that I still seek out in friends and colleagues.

But the gamble of affirmative action also benefited my alma mater—and all the predominantly white, elite institutions whose very DNA was changed by the practice. Though Clarence Thomas has clearly never gotten over what some see as the “stigma” of affirmative action, I certainly did. The same way that my worldview was expanded at Brown, the presence of minority students expanded the worldviews of our classmates.

We pretend we live in an equal and integrated society despite increased segregation over the past generation in our neighborhoods and our schools. A 2014 study found that three-quarters of white people didn’t have a single nonwhite friend. For many of my white classmates, college was their first chance to have meaningful relationships with a person from a different background. They participated—by force or by choice—in difficult conversations in dorm rooms about money or noise, and in classrooms about different assumptions. They were introduced to other cultures—salsa, banda, stepping, bhangra. In so many ways, the growing presence of people of color improved the “enrichment experience” for everyone around us.

Today, when I speak with minority students about imposter syndrome, I remind them that they are doing a service. They will likely be the only nonwhite friend most of their white college friends have for the rest of their life. I know that I am.

It may seem that this ruling affects only the most prestigious schools and the annoying overachievers who want to attend them. “Who cares?” you might ask. “If these kids have enough ganas, they can do just fine going to any school.” And to that I could reply: Eight out of the nine justices who just made this decision went to Ivies for undergraduate or law school (nine out of nine if we widen the category to “elite private schools”).

But even more important is the effect that diversity has on the research that elite institutions create. I have met many Latino academics, all probably products of affirmative action at some level, who simply did not exist in academia when I was in college. Their work on Latino health, voting patterns, emotional trauma, and other topics isn’t just good scholarship. It’s publicly accessible information that journalists like me can rely on to buttress a more expansive cultural conversation. Other minority researchers are studying unequal access to medical care, environmental racism, and the class disparities of health crises like long COVID. Affirmative action was designed to benefit minorities, but as America careens toward becoming a majority-minority nation, it has, in ways great and small, benefited us all.

I am about to celebrate my 25th college reunion. Of its Ivy League peers, Brown is probably known as the most bohemian. But when it does tradition, it does it very well. Reunions

and commencement happen concurrently and involve a tradition called “the inverted sock.” The alumni cross our campus gates, oldest to youngest, lining the street all the way down to the church where the undergraduates have their ceremony. And when the graduates come out, the alumni all parade past them.

It is a way of paying tribute. Of creating a sense of lineage. But it is also like counting the rings of a very old tree. You can see when the school became co-ed—the women marching with Brown banners instead of Pembroke ones. And you can see the effects of affirmative action, as each reunion class that walks through those wrought-iron gates becomes more reflective not of white power, but of America. Immigrants, and the sons and daughters of immigrants, and descendants of slaves walking side by side—and having equal thoughts and potential and merit—with the descendants of slave owners.

I hate to think that, 25 years from now, watching that procession, our diversity and excellence will seem but a blip, and fade away in the ripples of time.